Digital transformation (DX) is an important step in a company's ability to stay competitive in today’s evolving business landscape.​But what exactly is digital transformation? Some people think digital transformation is providing the newest and most relevant technologies to their employees in order to increase productivity levels. While digital technology is a major part of digital transformation, the concept itself is more complex.​

Yet the effective employment of digital strategies drives key benefits and across business lines, from improved productivity that fuels innovation to better business insights – but only if you approach digital transformation the right way.

It’s not the underlying technology that accounts for the poor performance of so many digital transformation projects. Rather, a lack of organizational readiness is a frequent culprit, including underestimating or not understanding the work and resources required, and factors such as poor data governance and executive cohesion.​Here are three key ways to beat the odds and achieve digital transformation success.​

Digital transformation (DX) is an important step in a company's ability to stay competitive in today’s evolving business landscape. But what exactly is digital transformation?

Some people think digital transformation is providing the newest and most relevant technologies to their employees in order to increase productivity levels. While digital technology is a major part of digital transformation, the concept itself is more complex.​

Customer experience and engagement have a tremendous impact on a company’s financial outlook, making these factors front of mind for companies across every industry. Yet customer lifecycle management encompasses more than money.

This process can generate and sustain goodwill and loyalty, help grow a business’s customer base, increase acquisition and retention, and more.​At Smartsheet ENGAGE’18, presenters from Marketo, SAP Ariba, and CAVU Aerospace shared insights into how they use Smartsheet for customer-centric operations to support customer success initiatives. Here’s how they collaborated with and provided real-time visibility to their customers, leading to refined workflows and improved customer experiences.​

I spend a lot of time talking with customers, particularly those who leverage Smartsheet for portfolio reporting. During the Smartsheet ENGAGE’18 customer conference, I spoke about portfolio reporting and how it can make an impact across businesses of all sizes.

I’ve worked with so many project managers (PMs) and program managers (PGMs) throughout my career, and I’ve seen a lot of traditional portfolio management tools. I believe that the generation of top-down portfolio management tools needs to be replaced by software as a service (SaaS) tools that integrate with the work being done, not just the portfolio being managed.​Older tools, while effective on an individual portfolio level, force users to do extra work to manage multiple projects. This means information workers have to go out of their way to access and compile PMO status reports and tracking.​

The success of your business depends on your ability to offer clients speed, consistency, and a high level of quality — and to do it again day after day and quarter after quarter. But as more businesses recognize the importance of providing seamless customer experiences across the supply chain, delivering customer satisfaction is no longer a competitive differentiator — it’s a business imperative.

While each customer is unique, there are common tasks and functions involved in managing these vital relationships, whether you work with just a few customers or hundreds of thousands. An ability to implement standard processes to guide each stage of the customer relationship can improve your ability to best serve each individual customer and also help you scale your business.​To help you meet your customers’ needs at every stage, we’ve designed these five templates and template sets to get you up and running in Smartsheet in no time.​

When it comes to working remotely, 16th-century poet John Donne may have said it best: “No man is an island entire of itself …”​Yet too often, remote workers exist on virtual islands, cut off from the day-to-day rhythm of business and one step removed from the company and team goals. This experience can be isolating for employees— and costly for business.​

In order to help you work more efficiently, Smartsheet has four views that enable you to see and work with your data in different ways. These views help provide project clarity and visibility and let you work using your preferred way to visualize information related to your projects and processes.

Grid view, the standard view you see when setting up your sheets, displays your data in a spreadsheet format. This view is a great place to start when setting up project information and task requirements. However, exploring the three other views in Smartsheet can help you see your data in new ways, quickly visualize timelines, and organize tasks into actionable groups.​Learn how card view, Gantt view, and calendar view enable you to take your sheets to the next level, expand your view, and help you work more effectively:​

It seems like almost nothing changes faster today than technology. Blink and you’ll see new innovations – as well as new threats. Alongside this tremendous change, we’re witnessing unprecedented demands on IT professionals – everywhere from cybersecurity to platform migrations to the cloud to demand for new and updated hardware that fits the latest market trends. While demand for IT professionals is going through the roof, the talent pool is not necessarily growing at the same speed.​

Businesses are banking on innovation as a top way to stay relevant and edge out the competition, a strategy that looks like it will pay off. According to a report from Accenture, 54 percent of large companies expect new business — including both novel products and entry into previously unexplored markets — to generate more than half of total revenues within the next few years.

And for the most innovative companies, a focus on driving innovation is already paying off: for the six percent of companies who have demonstrated the strongest ability to embrace organizational change, a whopping 75 percent of revenues stem from business activities that didn’t exist prior to 2015.​But before businesses can innovate, they must first develop their ability to discover and act on new ideas with speed and confidence. “Innovation is the implementation of a new or significantly improved product or process that creates a value,” says Linda Naiman, an organizational creativity consultant who has worked with a roster of enterprise and Fortune 500 companies that includes American Express and Cisco. “But you cannot innovate without creativity.”​